Category Archives: Guest Blogs

In my opinion, this is an excellent analysis of the SFF community at large. I’d count myself among the Progressive Fantacists, although my creative DNA might also include traits from the 9th Tribe. What do you think? What Tribe are you?

UPDATE 1: the most excellent Paul Weimer suggests a 9th tribe, and it makes a whole lot of sense. The 9 tribes of scifi? I like it. Paul’s thinking is as follows:

The tribe I think you missed is what could be glibly called The Worldbuilders. Worldbuilders have been under stress lately, as what makes a realistic world and what doesn’t has been riven with internal strife over the roles of women and POC on the fantasy side of fantasy. But Worldbuilders, both fantasy and SF flavors, are the kind of people who see a 800 page epic fantasy or SF novel with a rich and detailed world, and dive right into it, seeking deep immersion with a world and its characters. Maps. glossaries and appendices for these books are features, not bugs. Readers of stuff ranging from Kate Elliott to Brandon Sanderson to Peter F Hamilton and James S…

Hywel ap Cadell, the legendary king at the root of the mythology in The Dream Stewards series, was an intelligent, learned leader who modeled his leadership after the successful rulers of reference in his day. A pilgrimage to Rome in the early days of his reign is often credited as the point of inspiration behind Hywel’s greatest legacy – the codification of a written body of law that long survived him.

The reach of the Roman Empire was vast, and has naturally inspired and influenced the writing of many of my fellow history lovers. Author friend Stephanie Dray has invited me to help her celebrate the release of her new historical fantasy. DAUGHTERS OF THE NILE!

Join me and many other historical & fantasy authors for a full day of fun discussions, contests, and prizes!

On January 30th, from 12pm EST to 10pm EST, an impressive roster of historical fiction authors and bloggers are hosting a Facebook party in honor of historical fiction, the 2,023rd anniversary of the Ara Pacis, and the release of Stephanie Dray’s newest book, Daughters of the Nile: A novel of Cleopatra’s Daughter.

Readers can win free books, lunch at the next Historical Novel Society meeting, swag, gift cards, and other prizes from some of the hottest authors of the genre. Please join us, and RSVP!

Greetings, readers of Roberta! A big thank-you to my host for letting me take over her blog today. I write urban fantasies about a young woman who has –and I’m quoting from the Amazon page here – “a rare ability to counteract the supernatural by instantly neutralizing spells and magical forces.” In other words, when a vampire or werewolf steps within range of her, they become human again until they move away. I call someone with this ability a null. Roberta asked me to share how I came up with this concept and built the system of magic in my novels.

I don’t know whether other fantasy writers come up with their worlds first and then their protagonists, but for in my case, the null idea came first. It began with my interest in a few different things: crime scenes, how the supernatural could ever stay hidden in a modern world, and of course, the movie Hellboy 2. No, seriously. There’s a sequence in that film where the characters wear special goggles that let them see the supernatural, all the things that are usually hidden from human eyes. I was fascinated by the idea of someone who could see hidden things, and for a while I worked on a main character who was a crime scene photographer.

I played with the idea for ages, but whenever I got into all the real mythology questions, I kept running into problems. More importantly, the more I developed the character, the less I was able to connect with her. Runa was a little too squeaky-clean and cheerful for me to spend a whole book inside her head. I had hit a wall. Back to the drawing board.

While I was researching crime scenes, however, there was another set of images that kept popping into my head: scenes from the short-lived 2007 television show Moonlight. Within that show’s mythology, whenever there was supernatural evidence, you could call a phone number and this group of uber-tough women would show up to clean it for you. As I remember them (granted, this was six years ago) those cleaners were classic screen badasses: black catsuits, leather, dangerously high ponytails, eyeliner to kill, the works. I thought they were a bit cartoonish, but I was very taken with the idea of the crime scene cleaner. Who were these women? I wondered. How did they get the gig cleaning up after other people’s messes? Why would they be invested in it? And why would they wear black leather catsuits?

I don’t remember the exact light bulb moment, but at some point it all came together for me. What if instead of seeing the supernatural, my protagonist undid it? And what if she used that odd skill set to clean up after the smarmy-ass vampires who ran around doing whatever they wanted?

And as soon as I put those ideas together, it was like a switch had flipped. Scarlett was born, fully-formed in my mind. She wasn’t a classic screen badass, or a cartoon, or cheerfully optimistic about life. She was moody and withdrawn and sarcastic. She was frozen in place, underappreciated, apathetic, and deeply, deeply noble. She had a lot of growing up to do, and more than anything, she needed someone to give her the chance to do it.

(Fun fact: I didn’t give up on Runa the crime scene photographer. I brought her back in book two as a romantic foil for Scarlett. She ended up having a much bigger part in the story than I’d first planned, and she’ll even make an appearance in book 3.)

But when I decided who Scarlett was, and what she could do, I was really just getting started. I still had to figure out the rules of the world around her, and guys, that is hard. Worldbuilding is hard. But I needed to work out how magic worked, and why nulls could undo it. I spent a long time considering where Scarlett’s powers might come from, and what would set my world apart from other urban fantasies. Then I had to make it all fit together in a way that made some kind of logical sense. (This process mostly involved explaining my ideas to my husband, who has a knack for immediately poking a hole in a plot problem. Then I’d try to fix that hole, take it back to him, and he’d poke another. Repeat.) Here are the rules that I eventually came up with for Scarlett’s universe:

1. There is no other place. No Never-never, no alternate dimensions, no Heaven or Hell. There is only here.

2. To that end, there are no angels or demons. They do not exist – or at least, they don’t exist any more than they do in reality.

3. Magic is everywhere; a component of nature, a force of life. It’s not exactly the same, but if I had to compare it to an existing mythology, the one that comes closest is probably The Force.

4. Because magic is a force (small letter f), it has interacted with and affected evolution for millions of years. Evolution in general is a huge part of my mythology. (There’s more about this in A Brief History of Magic, which you can find on my website.)

5. There is something wrong with magic. For the last few hundred years or so, it had begun to fade, to die. (I know why, but I’m not telling you. That’s a mystery for later.) Around the time that magic began to fade, nulls began to appear on the supernatural scene.

6. There is no ruling leader, group, or organization for the supernatural world, which I call the Old World in my books. Although we live in a digital age, the world of magic is still stuck in a mindset that’s similar to the one used for settling the American West: you stake out an area and try to hold it. You have your own rules for within that area, and your own way of doing things. The world is too big, and the supernatural is too secret, for global or even national leadership.

7. There is only one law that applies globally to all of the Old World: thou shall never tell humans about the Old World. Humans who find out have to be either killed or converted. Since there is now something wrong with magic, which makes it less likely for someone to be able to become a vampire or werewolf, this rule has occasionally been relaxed a tiny bit when a human is particularly useful – but only for whoever’s in charge of that region.

There are, of course, a hundred other details about how things work, but these were the laws that I started with when I began Dead Spots. And they’re working for me – after the third book, Hunter’s Trail (fall 2014), I’ll be writing another book set in Scarlett’s universe, but with a different protagonist. I hope she’ll be every bit as fun to write as Scarlett has been.

~~~

Melissa F. Olson was born and raised in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and studied film and literature at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. After graduation, and a brief stint bouncing around the Hollywood studio system, Melissa moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where she eventually acquired a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, a husband, a mortgage, two kids, and two comically oversize dogs—not at all in that order. She is the author of Dead Spots, Trail of Dead, and the upcoming Hunter’s Trail.

Let the Yule Tide begin! Starting today, fellow 47North fantasy author Melissa F. Olson (Dead Spots) is hosting a series of twelve guest posts on the subject of religion and speculative fiction. Click the logo to visit Melissa’s blog, and the kick off feature – my article on the role of faith in fantasy fiction:

Join me and fellow 47North epic fantasy authors Michael Tinker Pearce & Linda Pearce on their blog, where I tell the story of how I fell in love with history – medieval history, that is. Naturally, there is a book involved:

In celebration of this All Hallow’s Eve, I invited fellow 47North author Roberto Calas over to talk about the Undead…

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Zombies are a modern-day thing, right? A quirky invention of our contemporary imaginations?

Everyone knows that George Romero gave them stardom in 1968 with “Night of the Living Dead,” and that they have been with us ever since. Except that’s not quite right. You have to go back a little farther than 1968. Some of you zombie aficionados may know about William Seabrook’s novel, “The Magic Island,” from 1929. Seabrook’s story was probably the first to mention zombies. But the idea of zombies goes back even farther. Farther than colonial Haiti. Farther than pre-colonial West Africa.

I argue that zombies have been around for much, much longer than that. Like, Medieval longer. And I’m not just saying that because I wrote a novel about zombies in the Middle Ages. I’m saying it because it’s true. And I have proof.

Let me start with a little background on medieval people: they were really religious.

I’m not talking Tammy Faye Baker religious. Or even Reverend Al Sharpton religious. I’m talking, go-to-services-for-hours-a-day religious. Give-ten-percent-of-their-money-to-the-church-despite-barely-having-enough-to-eat religious. They went to confession whenever an impure thought crossed their minds. Christ, I’d have to rent space in a confessional if I did that. Sure, not all of them took it to that extreme, but a great many of them did. And so religion ruled their lives and thoughts.

So when the church said that animals and flies could be possessed by demons, they believed. And when their priest told them that if they swallowed a possessed fly the demon would transfer to them, they kept their mouths shut. And when a person who everyone thought was dead woke up . . .

There were many cases where a person in the Middle Ages was mistakenly pronounced dead. They were anointed with oils and given the Last Rites by a priest and that was the end of it. Until it wasn’t.

When people who weren’t *really* dead (but appeared to be) woke up, it became a crisis of faith. You see, their souls had already been commended to heaven, and they were absolved of all sins (remember that last one, I’ll get back to it). The Catholic Church was not known for its gracious acknowledgement of mistakes. When dead people woke up, it meant the priests were wrong. And priests were never wrong. So the explanation? The poor victim was an abomination, no longer human. One of the walking dead. A zombie. Panicked villagers often attacked these abominations, and the poor victims swiftly regained their *dead* status.

Those victims who lived usually fled their village and sometimes took jobs as “sin eaters.” The priests had already absolved them of all sins for eternity, remember? So they made their living in a sort of moral loophole, eating the sins of people who had died.

Families would pay sin eaters to eat a meal for their departed loved ones. Sounds easy enough, no? Except the food was often placed on the cadaver of the deceased. Yes, sin-eaters were paid to eat food from a large, pink, rotting plate. By eating this food, the sins of the deceased were transferred to the sin-eater, who was already absolved of his or her sins forever. The sins, caught in a sort of infinite moral loop, apparently imploded or spent eternity in a quantum farm somewhere with herds of other sins. Remember that tank where the Ghostbusters kept their captured ghosts? Think of it like that. It helps.

In book two of my Scourge trilogy – The Scourge: Nostrum – I introduce a man who was once a sin eater. His name is Praeteritus (Francis, really) and he couldn’t bear eating food off dead bodies anymore. So he became a killer. And I can’t say I blame him.

While abominations like Praeteritus made people nervous, there were other “zombies” that were far worse. Zombies that terrified medieval peasants. Demons wearing corpses and roaming the land. Evil spirits that sought to drag you down to hell for an eternity of torment. They were called revenants and they could possess any dead body.

So how did demons get into these corpses? Usually the same way the flies did. Through the mouth. This may explain the terrifying graves found in Ireland recently. Two 8th century corpses were dug up in Loch Key with black stones shoved into their mouths. One stone was pounded so violently into the mouth of a man that it almost dislocated the jaw. Seems like there was a whole lot of fear behind the hand that jammed the stone in.

It is one thing to believe that corpses could be possessed. It is quite another to jam rocks into the mouths of dead men. It makes you wonder what evidence these Irish peasants had to believe the two cadavers might return to life. Maybe these Irish peasants had evidence of revenants. Maybe there was a Romero-esque struggle in Loch Key.

Probably not. Zombies are a modern day thing, after all. A quirky invention of our contemporary imaginations.

Aren’t they?

***

Roberto Calas is an author and lover of history. His serial trilogy (The Scourge) is about a 14th century knight fighting his way through a zombie-infested England to reunite with the woman he loves. And every bit of it is true except for the made up parts.

In addition to The Scourge series, Roberto has written The Beast of Maug Maurai (fantasy), and Kingdom of Glass (historical fiction in the Foreworld universe). He lives in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, with his two children, and visits the United Kingdom on a monthly basis to be with his fiancée, Annabelle. Sometimes he fights zombies to get to her.

Fellow 47North author and devoted father Stant Litore and his wife are creating a loving and unique gift for their little girls (one of whom suffers from a host of medical issues). Everyone can participate in this project – it won’t cost you a thing except a few minutes of your time. Click on the image below to read about the project, and then add your personal contribution to this wonderful collection:

And after that, take a minute to check out Stant’s Zombie Bible series:

It’s the summer of 1816, Switzerland, although it doesn’t feel like it—the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora has cast the world into a long volcanic winter. What’s a bored girl to do?

If you’re 19-year old Mary Shelley, you decide you’re going to win a bet about who can come up with the scariest tale, this although you’re up against Percy Shelley (you’re not married to him yet) and Lord Bryon. And a classic novel that bent, blended, and invented genres, is born.

Although Frankenstein most obviously checks the horror genre box, it carries romantic and gothic elements and is considered by many to be one of the earliest examples of science fiction too. That genre mix was popular with readers, not so much with critics. The Quarterly Review called Frankenstein, “a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity”.

Apparently they hadn’t read the Monsanto prospectus.

As if mixing horror, gothic, romance, and sci-fi wasn’t enough of a feat, Frankenstein also sprinkles in some Greek mythology. Five second quiz for all you horror aficionados this Halloween—what was Frankenstein’s alternate title?

Not so Warm Bodies

Dawn of the Newly Re-Assembled Dead

The Modern Prometheus

You’re right, it’s C (can’t fool you none).

Prometheus was more than a bad prequel to Aliens. In the Western psyche, Prometheus serves as the epitome of bad things that happen when you pursue science without understanding its dangerous consequences, interesting because at the time Shelley wrote Frankenstein, experiments were being performed on dead flesh. These experiments included the electro-stimulation of executed prisoner George Forster’s limbs at Newgate in London. “On the first application of the process to the face, the jaws of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion.”

So now we have horror, gothic, romance, sci-fi, Greek mythology and the moral implications of contemporary issues. Let’s add some personal experience, shall we?

Shelley did what any good writer of her, or any time, would do, which was to mix bits of her own life, her experienced horror, into the story. Frankenstein, (the scientist, not the monster who had no name), loses his mother to scarlet fever, then his brother and wife are murdered by the creature. Shelley’s own mother died eleven days after giving birth to her, leaving an epic void in her life. She lost one of her children shortly after giving birth, and lived through the suicide of her stepmother and stepsister. Not exactly a stranger to death’s sting. And it’s quite probable that the emotional impact of her personal experience is what gives Frankenstein its longevity and contemporary relevance.

Do audiences still want that kind of genre blend?

When I first started to shop my novel POE, everyone loved the writing but no one knew where to sell it. And they told me that if, miraculously, they did find a publisher, where the heck would the bookstores shelve it? All would be better if POE colored inside some genre lines. It couldn’t be horror and new adult and dark urban fantasy and literary. It couldn’t span Russian occult practices in the early 20th century, the séance craze during America’s gilded age, a contemporary and economically depressed New England town, magic squares, ghosts, angels/demons, my own horrific hospital experience plus my parents’ deaths, and, for god’s sake, be irreverent too. I tried, but I just couldn’t write it any other way. It wouldn’t let me.

Through sheer, dumb luck, I finally entered POE into the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest where it placed first in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror category. Then, through an even bigger stroke of dumb luck, Amazon’s 47North was publishing the winner because they were looking for genre-bending work.

I’d finally found the island of misfit toys where I belonged, in a cadre of other authors who don’t fit into boxes neatly either (you can see them here – buy all their books, please). Maybe Shelley should be our patron saint.

Because if Frankenstein is any example, one should be careful about underestimating the market for books that defy easy categorization.

Here’s to new latitudes, odd genre blends, and virtual shelves you can call whatever the hell you want.

“A delightful, bravura piece of gothic pop…fans of Neil Gaiman and the aforementioned Buffy will be immediately taken, but there’s a literate edge to the pyrotechnics that makes for an unlikely and welcome marriage between the spook story and literature of altogether less ectoplasmic substance.” Publisher’s Weekly

IT’S HALLOWEEN, AND LIFE IS GRIM for twenty-three-year-old Dimitri Petrov. It’s the one-year anniversary of his parents’ deaths, he’s stuck on page one thousand of his Rasputin zombie novel, and he makes his living writing obituaries. But things turn from bleak to terrifying when Dimitri gets a last-minute assignment to cover a séance at the reputedly haunted Aspinwall Mansion.

There, Dimitri meets Lisa, a punk-rock drummer he falls hard for. But just as he’s about to ask her out, he unwittingly unleashes malevolent forces, throwing him into a deadly mystery. When Dimitri wakes up, he is in the morgue—icy cold and haunted by a cryptic warning given by a tantalizing female spirit. As town residents begin to turn up gruesomely murdered, Dimitri must play detective in his own story and unravel the connections among his family, the Aspinwall Mansion, the female spirit, and the secrets held in a pair of crumbling antiquarian books. If he doesn’t, it’s quite possible Lisa will be the next victim.

Today I am guest blogging and hanging out with the gang at Murder She Writes – a co-op blog by a group of supremely talented mystery & suspense authors. Special thanks to author pal Kendra Elliot for hosting me!